Four Leadership Loads That Keep Getting Heavier

Feeling emotionally drained at work? Is your patience exhausted? Your energy low? If so, you’re showing clinical markers of burnout.

And you’re not alone. In a January 2024 mental health survey conducted by NAMI, more than half of all managers (54%) indicated that they had felt burned out during the past year because of their job. Among employees of all levels, 36% said their mental health had suffered due to work demands. Even folks in the C-suite are heading for the exits.

No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder. Leaders rush from meeting to meeting feeling like lunchroom attendants for an unruly junior high. With exponentially escalating business complexity; diminished civility; and intrusive, pervasive technological interruptions, you may feel like it’s barely possible to keep order, let alone lead employees on an inspiring journey.

It’s Not Your Imagination: Where Leadership Is Tougher

Four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: hyping up their teams, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane themselves. But understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better.

1. Leader as Cheerleader: Hyping Up Your Team

Sometime in 2011, my boss brought me a chocolate muffin. I mention this not only because it was my introduction to the idea of servant leadership (thank you, Dave!) but also because it remains an excellent example of the simplicity of morale-building. You don’t have to hire a brass band and shoot off fireworks; you do have to say thank you, send a nice email, and offer a bit of chocolate at around 3:00 p.m. Consistently appreciate the humans around you. Be a mensch.

The basics of keeping your team energized haven’t changed. But the environment in which you’re doing so certainly has. Work in 2024 has been noisy. For instance, the average worker receives 121 emails a day — and that’s not counting instant messaging pings, texts, or, God forbid, phone calls. Let’s say that you, as their manager, send 10% of those emails. That’s still more than 100 messages a day that you didn’t send. Those messages could be morale-destroying, truly exciting, or anywhere in between — and don’t even get employees started on dealing with the oversharers and negativity-dispensers in group chat (and private group chats). You’re bringing a chocolate muffin into an environment akin to Times Square at high noon. It’s hard to be loud enough to get people’s attention, and the pressure to be authentic has never been higher.

What to do: First of all, don’t get knocked off your game. It’s tempting, in the face of so much cross-talk, to retreat behind a robotic facade and a series of irritatingly bland and distinctly corporate-flavored communications. Don’t do that. Continue your “ground game” for keeping the team’s spirits up, in a way that’s authentic to you. But adapt your approach to fight the clutter and the conflicting messages around you. Relentlessly join in the conversation wherever it occurs — and be punchy. A quick, funny GIF, a one-line email, or a two-minute conversation at someone’s desk can all be effective, if that’s where folks are listening. In general, think shorter, more frequent communication, varied across more channels. You can’t be everywhere, but you can make your personal warmth felt in bursts.

2. Leader as Detective: Getting to the Truth

Data-driven leadership was supposed to save the world — or at least bring us closer to a shared view of what was actually going on inside any given organization. No more turmoil: We had dashboards! The truth was going to be right at our fingertips, and every decision was going to be smarter as a result.

Instead, a proliferation of data of questionable quality, housed within a host of competing systems, now just confuses many people further. You could compare the current state of play to Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon — in which a terrible crime is described by four different narrators, none of whose accounts match.

Worse, though, the right comparison might not exist in the world of thrillers but rather in science fiction. Many organizations have enough data telling different stories that they qualify as a full-on metaverse — with different leaders living in different realities, with their own streams of data attached. That’s painful: Instead of starting every conversation from a shared understanding, you’re more at cross purposes than ever.

What to do: Think like a data scientist — not in the sense of learning to code or performing advanced analytics, but in the sense of asking better questions of information, in a structured and methodical way. Don’t be afraid to ask where data came from, what the gaps in a data set might be, or what kinds of analytics were performed to get to the numbers you’re seeing. Come in with a hypothesis and see if it proves out rather than just taking the numbers at face value. It’s slightly counterintuitive, but being a tougher data analyst makes you a better truth sleuth.

3. Leader as General: Focusing on Strategy

Incredibly, corporate strategy as a discipline has been around for only 70 years or so. (How entertaining it must have been up until 1950, to just wing it through multiple industrial revolutions.) Today, though, we see strategy as the core of many leadership roles. We exalt leaders who are seen as strategic thinkers.

Sadly, nowadays, thinking through and executing on an organizational strategy can be excruciating. For one, whose strategy is it, anyway? We’ve hit a level of complexity in many organizations where the matrix structure runs to four or five dimensions. This is a hoot to try to visualize on a slide but less amusing when you’re a leader trying to set strategy for your matrix slice — and managing for all of the interactions with everyone else’s slices.

Even if you can work through the complexity of a multistrategy environment where strategies stack atop each other precariously, keeping strategy execution on track amid constantly changing data stories and general initiative overload is a Herculean labor — or, worse, maybe a Sisyphean one.

What to do: Strategy requires space, so give strategic work some oxygen. Clear time among an endless array of tactical meetings to check on how your strategy is doing. Strategy is not a dog that needs to be walked twice a day, but it might be a plant that has to be watered a few times a week.

Color-coding your calendar against your strategic objectives can help keep you honest — though the results may alarm you at times. The brute-force metric of how much time you spend on strategy is perhaps the only way to hold tight to your objectives, day to day and week to week.

4. Leader as Human Being: Staying Sane Yourself

Back to those burnt-out managers and leaders: Perhaps the signature challenge of leadership today is just maintaining your own mental well-being. It’s hard to truly support and energize the people around you when you’re completely drained yourself. All of the factors we’ve just talked about (noisy, confusing work environments; an overload of conflicting data; little time and space for strategy) also affect the emotions of leaders managing through them.

Is (technological) help on the way? Perhaps. Intriguing survey data from the Capgemini Research Institute suggests that, in partnership with generative AI tools, many leadership roles may become either more strategic or more specialized in nature — which could lessen the work overload of today’s general management roles. But as any student of work will crankily tell you, the key to elevating work is not throwing more activity in to replace the activity technology just took over.

What to do: It would be professional malpractice for me to recommend self-care. For different individuals, activities like meditation, yoga, or soaking in a fragrant bath might be lovely and relaxing. But given that we’ve reached a point where more than half of the managers in the U.S. are suffering from burnout — and even CEOs are marching out of the corner office — it’s clear that the issue is systemic in nature. It’s not addressable with scented candles. Treating yourself to a chocolate muffin will not suffice.

Instead, leaders need to pick their battles at work, focusing on what must get done, and draw their boundaries alongside work — defending what cannot be sacrificed in their lives in the name of getting their must-do’s done. You get bonus points, obviously, for fixing the broken work of your team. When you do this, you support the sanity of the people around you.

We wear a lot of hats as leaders: cheerleader, detective, strategic general, and human being. It’s OK to say that your head feels heavy. Acknowledging the strain is the first step toward holding our heads a little higher.

“The MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management.”

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